A palmate newt – its impervious gaze scanned minute horizons between the worlds of water and air. Photograph: Maria Nunzia Calderone for the Guardian

The amphibious face looked out from dark water; its impervious gaze scanned minute horizons between the worlds of water and air. I couldn't tell what it saw or thought, but felt its expressionless expression spanned aeons through which the evolution of seeing and thinking had changed much between the newt and me.

A palmate newt scrambled out of a bucket. It had been accidentally raked up in algae from a pond and wriggled free. The algae looked like flowing green hair in water but was drying into a lump of nylon stuffing in the bucket. The almost instant change of substance and form when aquatic things are dragged from the water is always a disappointment; they lose a kind of magic in our savage air. Like waking from a dream, they have to make sense in our terrestrial reality. Similarly, things of dry land which end up underwater seem to gain a strange sense of otherness. Amphibians move in both directions and bring their ancient strangeness with them.

First I only noticed movement, a kind of awkward bending like those squidgy plastic toys which stick to glass. With the consistency of jellied tongue, the newt appeared to be made of stuff from mucky ponds. I put it on a marsh marigold leaf. There was a tiny dragon, 6cm long with a low dorsal ridge down its back, a wide spotted tail and darkly webbed back feet. This was its breeding time, only possible in its original state, and returning it to its pond felt like an acknowledgment of a debt owed to water life. The newt stared from its between world. Around it, orange-tip butterflies sought cuckoo flowers and willow warblers sang in hedges. The newt slid under the meniscus of the pond, without changing, still staring, even down in the watery dark, watching.